


Borrowing Freedom

by otter



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-14
Updated: 2011-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:16:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otter/pseuds/otter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Mal's rehabilitation into civilized society: they give him back his own clothes, sealed tight in a plastic bag to keep the stench in. There's soil from Serenity Valley clinging to the soles of the boots, and Bendis' blood still spattered on the collar of his shirt. When he puts the clothes back on, they crackle, but his coat still hangs from his shoulders the way he remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Borrowing Freedom

This is Mal's rehabilitation into civilized society:

They give him back his own clothes, sealed tight in a plastic bag to keep the stench in. There's soil from Serenity Valley clinging to the soles of the boots, and Bendis' blood still spattered on the collar of his shirt. When he puts the clothes back on, they crackle, but his coat still hangs from his shoulders the way he remembers.

They give him a conditional work permit. The green stripe along the bottom of his identity card means that he is allowed to perform any of the half-paid and hazardous jobs reserved for ex-convicts. The image of Mal that's printed on the card shows a hollow-eyed ghost with Mal's face; Mal supposes that that's what he looks like now, but it's been awhile since he's looked in a mirror.

They give him a bar of soap, two new pairs of socks, and a ride on a rusty old freighter to the ass end of nowhere.

The Whitby carries them ten days out, crowded into the belly of the hold, and then leaves them squinting into the desert at Stantontown, the backwash from the freighter's engines covering them in dust like ash.

Stantontown is a mine, a company store, a bar, a short row of cribs, and a tent hotel out in the back. It isn't slavery because there's a wage, and it isn't a prison because there are no fences, but there's not another anything for miles and miles, just desert stretching out into nothing. Mal watches the other men go, the way their backs bend under the weight of the wind. There's a whore lingering in the doorway of her crib like a window display.

Mal goes into the bar and trades his food vouchers for three throat-stripping drinks, and then he comes out of the bar and starts walking into the nothing.

It's hours later that the horses come, and at first he's certain that he's imagining them, until they're right on top of him, passing by so close that he can feel the ground shake with their passage, smell the dirt and sweat, could reach out a hand and touch sleek, warm flanks, but that the animals roll their eyes nervously as they pass him.

"You there," somebody says, while he's watching the horses in the rear tucking themselves up into the herd, and their dust cloud sweeping off across the barrens on the other side of the road. "Hey, shagua. Can you sit a horse?"

Mal blinks, and the herd is still there, slowing, a few animals along the edge stopping to pick over sparse dried grass at the side of the road. There's a rider too, stopped just in front of Mal and squinting down at him, wrinkle-faced and gray-haired and ancient as Methuselah, eyes just little black slits underneath a broad-brimmed hat.

"You simple, boy, or just surly?" the woman says. She shifts in the saddle, and Mal isn't sure if the creaking protest he hears comes from the well-worn leather or the old woman's bones.

Mal coughs the dust and dry from his throat and says, "Neither, ma'am, just a bit out of sorts." He runs a hand through his hair, and doesn't look down at his clothes. They reek of ozone and gore, and he's been trudging down this road like he's trying to walk out of Serenity Valley, but the stench of a man's world dead and rotting isn't so easily escaped.

"My last man was simple," the woman says, loudly, as if she can't hardly hear herself. "Most often it took a bottle to get him there, but he was damned useless when he was sober, anyhow. Left him back in Stantontown, on the saloon floor." She leans over, squints a little harder. "You can ride, can't you, boy?"

"Yes, ma'am," Mal says obediently. He doesn't particularly need a job -- he's busy killing himself, and working gets in a man's way with a mission like that -- but he still finds it difficult to ignore work that needs doing. "Rope and brand, too, if that's any use to you."

"Ain't got cattle," the woman says, but she hads him the rein to the second horse that she's ponying along. "Saddle belonged to the hand," she says, "I left it in town. You stay on that horse all the way back, help me bring in this herd, you got yourself a job."

The horse is flat black, a gelding with a big dark eye and a heavily muscled chest, bulldog-built and sturdy, mane roached into an almost military mohawk. He's got white-haired scars on his back from an ill-fitted saddle, a twist of white around the left forehand pastern that was probably a nasty run-in with barbed wire, and there are little scars around the corners of his mouth where the bit's split the skin before.

They've each had their indignities to suffer.

"Alright," Mal says, and leaps on to the gelding's back a little less nimbly than he remembers doing as a teenager. It's been years since he's touched a horse, much less ridden one. But the horse's back underneath him is a familiar feeling, and his legs snug up into the groove behind the horse's shoulders as if they've always belonged there.

"Alright then," the old woman agrees, and she heels her bay off at a jog, pushing the herd onward.

Mal's horse snorts at him, and Mal snorts back, takes the rein loose in one hand and fists the fingers of the other into the short thatch of mane at the gelding's withers. "Hey, old man," Mal says. "Be nice to me, huh? It's been awhile."

The horse squirms and wrings his head, impatient, and when Mal gives him his mouth, he sets his own pace, moving off at a smooth, easy jog that Mal can sit effortlessly, like climbing into grandma's rocking chair.


End file.
